A Ghanaian owned company, Orcons Systems Limited, has developed a one-stop mobile application for healthcare management in the country.
The usage of the application, known as Hewale, is currently being piloted by the company and the Ghana Health Service in parts of the Eastern Region.
Hewale, a Ga word meaning health, is the name of the “dynamic innovative” mobile and web base healthcare management platform that can be used by both medical practitioners and patients to enable effective healthcare management in the country.
The platform comprises three main modules, all connecting to a common database. The modules include ‘Hospital Management System’, which digitizes all patients’ records in any hospital, from personal details, vitals, doctors’ consultation, laboratory management and digital lab results, including x-rays and scans, prescriptions, pharmacy management, among others. It is a complete digitized healthcare management system with tool for managing a patient from OPD, IPD, specialist clinics, as well as mortuary management.
Social health platform
This module is a virtual private healthcare (VPH) platform consisting of care modalities that are provided to all patients inside and outside of a clinical setting. This complete ‘online hospital’ allows patients to consult, remotely, with a medical practitioner anywhere, anytime on their mobile devices, laptops and tablets.
The Hewale Social Health Platform is also equipped with all the tools of the health management system, such that doctors are able to manage patients from remote locations. Through this, patients are able to interact with their doctors privately on the go; get more medical advice from the comfort of their homes via their smartphones or tablet; receive drug prescriptions from their doctors; carry out medical laboratory test; and get their prescribed drugs from licensed pharmacies delivered to them at their homes.
Medical practitioners are also able to interact with one another and share knowledge and experiences. In effect, through the Hewale Social Health, any medical doctor can build for himself a successful virtual private hospital (VPH) without having any physical health infrastructure. This is akin to the operations of Uber, the largest taxi company in the world, which does not have a single vehicle of its own.
Hewale CHPS compound
This is specially designed and programmed for the Ghana Health Service structure to take care of their telemedicine needs. The platform has been specially tailored to assist health centres, CHPS compounds and smaller hospitals who do not have doctors present in their facility. The system allows nurses and physician assistants (PAs) to seek immediate doctors’ advice and reviews on cases that come to their facilities. This module is also linked to the health management system.
With recent news in the digitization of the economy, and the innovative development with the medical drone services rolled out by the government, Hewale is a crucial compliment to these existing technological structures. The CHPS system also introduces audio-visual consultations to bridge the doctor-patient ratio and make quality health care accessible to people in rural communities.
The CHPS system is also embedded with tools that allow for health facilities in remote areas to order their drone delivery services on the platform. This will help the Ghana Health Service to have access to real-time data on the drone delivery with details of where, when and what was delivered by the drones.
Benefits
Some benefits of using the App include creation of a common database for all national patients. This means there will be one uniform patients’ records kept by the state and thus medical records of patients can be accessed anywhere in the country.
It also reduces the number of visits to health facilities by patients since the Hewale Social Health allows for remote and online consultation for none critical healthcare issues.
Again, it brings expert/specialist advice to the doorstep of the remote health centres since it will enable senior doctors in other hospitals to bring their experience and expertise to the remote healthcare centres without physically being present. It also provides continuous learning and training for healthcare practitioners. This is because the platform is integrated with IBM Healthcare Watson database, which assists doctors in Ghana with current and up-to-date healthcare tips, diagnostics, treatment, prescription, among others, for various ailments.
